Slashdot Mirror
Foreign Hackers Attack Canadian Government
An anonymous reader writes " According to the CBC: 'An unprecedented cyberattack on the Canadian government from China has given foreign hackers access to highly classified federal information, and forced at least two key departments off the internet, CBC News has learned. The attack, first detected in early January, left Canadian counter-espionage agents scrambling to determine how much sensitive government information may have been stolen and by whom.' It should be noted that the Auditor-General warned of this months ago and was ignored by everyone as she usually is. It should also be noted that public sentiment towards China is getting very, very testy."
This attack could have been EASILY avoided using 1 simple system: PGP digital signing. Give every government address a PGP key and set up a government public key repository. Any company doing work with the government has no excuse for not being able to do the same.
You then set up the email servers to block any email with attachments that isn't signed by a trusted key.
PGP signing (and even encryption in most cases) is so pathetically easy to set up, the fact that governments don't MANDATE it for internal use (and even external use for anything other than simple civilian inquiries) is absolutely unforgivable.